Bing Gains On Yahoo, Google In November

Microsoft employees should know that setting off fireworks would be neither seasonally appropriate nor entirely in proportion to the small search gains Bing may have seen last month. But a new comScore report indicates that Bing did indeed see its share of the search market increase in November, and that's all the more significant since Google and Yahoo saw their shares go down.

Let's start at the top of the search pile. According to comScore, Google's share decreased by the smallest measurable amount, dropping from 66.3 percent to 66.2 percent. Then Yahoo's share fell by the same amount, sending it from 16.5 percent to 16.4 percent (although 0.1 percent of course means more to Yahoo than Google).

That brings us to Bing. comScore's stats indicate Bing's share of the search market rose from 11.5 percent in October to 11.8 percent in November, making for a not-inconsiderable gain of 2.6 percent month-over-month.

That's pretty impressive by itself. Also, it puts the Bing-Yahoo partnership up in November, meaning Bing isn't just stealing users away from its new associate.

Anyway, credit for the stats goes to JP Morgan's Imran Khan and Dan Frommer, since comScore hasn't actually released the data on its own just yet.